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Monday, November 5, 2007

The situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate. Pakistan military personnel fighting the Taliban in the northwest (Waziristan) are surrendering or being captured and beheaded in droves. President Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution. The Supreme Court has been disbanded. Thousands have been arrested and thousands more are marching in the streets in protest.

Why should we care? We should care because Pakistan has nuclear weapons and the Islamists fighting against the government want them. If they get them we will almost certainly be a target. We should also care because Musharraf has been a fairly steady ally in the war on terror. Should he fall, Pakistan, with its 160 million Muslims, may be lost to us.

The only silver lining here is that Musharraf may be getting desperate enough to take serious measures against the Taliban, and may even invite us to help him. This would go a long toward easing Taliban pressure on Afghanistan.

As Hugo Chavez moves inexorably closer to becoming a dictator in Venezuela and as thousands of protestors fill the streets to demand that he stop his quest for absolute power, the American left is showing its solidarity with ... Chavez.

It's not just Cindy Sheehan, of course. Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, and Danny Glover have all made the pilgrimmage to Caracas to pay homage to the man who promises to be the next Fidel Castro.

The left has a strange fascination with thugs and killers. They loved Fidel Castro, and they recently oberved the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. Che was a mass killer, who did Castro's dirty work after he overthrew the Batista regime in 1959, executing hundreds of members of the previous government, but the left reveres his memory anyway, just as they loved Stalin and Mao who murdered millions of their countrymen in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of students and others are marching for freedom in Venezuela and are being suppressed by rubber bullets, tear gas, and fire hoses, and the left in the U.S. is largely silent. Chavez wants to impose socialism in Venezuela and civil and political rights are expendable if they stand in the way of socialism.

This story about Francis Bok, a Christian refugee from the Sudan, is a snapshot of what life is like for black African Christians living in an Arab Muslim country. It's a column you shouldn't miss. Here are the opening paragraphs:

It was the kind of excitement that made children uneasy. Grownups were pointing toward the river. Others were arriving at a run. The bustling atmosphere in the market place of the peaceful African town of Nyamlell in the Dinka tribal area in the southern Sudan was changing. Worried adults could see what a seven-year-old Dinka boy, Francis Bok, who had gone to the market that fateful day with older village children to sell his mother's eggs and peanuts, could not: "a storm of smoke" rising from a nearby village. Sellers frantically began to gather up their wares and hurry away with the buyers. The adults understood. They recognized the approaching signs of the dreaded scourge that most people believed had disappeared from the pages of African history long ago: a slave raid.

It was 1986 and Bok was about to see his happy world of family and village shattered forever by a centuries-old, barbaric practice that has never died out: the violent capture and enslavement of black Africans by Arabs.

"The Arab militias were told to kill the men and enslave the women and children," said the now 28-year-old Bok, who was himself captured and enslaved that day, to an audience of 80 people at the University of Toronto recently where he had been invited to speak by the campus organization, Zionists at U. of T.

Bok, who would spend the next ten years working as a child slave, then outlined for his college listeners in horrifying detail the savage hurricane of violence he next witnessed when the Arab slavers attacked.